33. Your statement "the NRA ... would have us believe that more guns mean more safety" is not supported

by your link.

Anyone can follow the link to a page which does not say what you said.

Although this is my first time reading the page and I may have read it quickly, I see nothing at all supporting your statement

"the NRA ... would have us believe that more guns mean more safety"

Whether a person owns a firearm or not is an individual choice. If you cannot point to specific language where "the NRA ... would have us believe that more guns mean more safety," you've obviously just that up as a straw-man.

(Actually, without any particpation of the NRA, it would seem to be a matter of common sense that if you do not live in a gated community and there is a prevalency of home break-ins, those engaged in such criminal activity may desire to practice their trade in safer areas where gun ownership is known to be lower. That's based upon common sense. Any position of the NRA, or non-position, is irrelevant.)

So you found a web page of the NRAILA. So what? You merely found a web page which does not support your representation. At most, you merely found a web page of the NRAILA.

“States that adopted nondiscretionary concealed-handgun laws saw murders decreased by at least 8%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7% and robberies by 3%. The murder rates of women permit-holders fell by as much as five times the drop of their male counterparts.” NRA-ILA,
http://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/did-you-know.aspx

“Coinciding with a surge in gun purchases that began shortly before the 2008 elections, violent crime decreased six percent between 2008 and 2009, according to the FBI. This included an eight percent decrease in murder and a nine percent decrease in robbery.
“Since 1991, when total violent crime peaked, it has decreased 43 percent to a 35-year low. The murder rate, less than half what it was in 1980, is now at a 45-year low.
“Throughout, the number of guns that Americans own has risen by about four million a year, including record numbers of the two types of firearms that the Brady (Campaign) folks would most like to see banned — handguns and the various firearms they call ‘assault weapons.’” ~ NRA-ILA, 12-19-2012
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2593272/posts

47. My apologies for misunderstanding.

Correlations are often indicative of causal relationships, however. An across-the-board dismissal of correlation analysis is not .. can't think of a good word ... advisable, I suppose. As I stated below, correlation should never be accepted as indicative of causation unquestionably.

2. You might be interested in this study...

They look at changes in gun ownership and changes in homicide rates at the county level, and find that, after controlling for various socioeconomic factors, on average, an increase in 10,000 gun-owning household results in between one and three additional homicides.
http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JPubE_guns_2006FINAL.pdf

3. From that same study:

Page 9, bottom of page: Table 5 provides suggestive evidence that gun prevalence leads to elevated
rates of homicide through the transfer of guns from "legal" to "illegal" owners, rather
than through increased gun misuse by otherwise legal owners.

5. Umm, yeah, but as the authors point out, guns get transferred from legal to illegal owners.

Which means that, increases in civilian gun ownership overall results in higher homicide rates. Obviously some people are more likely to misuse guns than others. But overall, the statistics show that more guns = more homicide.

10. Speculation.

In fact, the evidence that most of the effect of gun ownership on crime is through transfers to illegal gun owners is also only suggestive, as the authors point out.

What the evidence shows conclusively is that higher rates of gun ownership results in higher homicide rates. There are many possible means by which this effect take place. The whole idea that the world can be divided neatly into law-abiders and criminals is fallacious.

24. Then why do we have so many folks in prison?

Criminology is a well studied field. The vast majority of those who misuse guns already have police records of violent behavior. It is very rare for a law-abiding person to misuse a gun. It does happen sometimes, but it is rare.

11. Sorry, the stats are mine...

The Pearson's r is a measure of how strongly two variables are correlated. If one goes up/down, does the other tend to go up/down? A causal relationship should not be inferred unquestionably.

The p-value is commonly called significance. It is commonly explained as the probability (that's where the "p" comes from) that the results of a statistical test could have arisen by chance alone. A score of 0.0001 means there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that the observed associated appeared just by chance; such a low p-value suggests that the association is "real." A positive correlation means that when one variable goes up, the other also goes up. A negative correlation means that when one variable goes up, the other goes down.

Multiple regression can be thought of as similar to a Pearson correlation, but instead of a one-to-one correlation, one is testing to see how several predictor variables might influence a dependent variable.

Part correlations are a bit tricky conceptually. When predictor variables are correlated not only to with a dependent variable, but also with each other, things get confusing. Basically, it's an effort to disentangle some of the intercorelations to see which predictor variable is having the most effect on the dependent variable.

16. The intent of this post was to counter something...

...that I've heard with increasing frequency over the past four days -- that more guns is the answer. That guns make us safer. These stats dispute those notions. Perhaps I should have put them into some context, but I'm not much of a writer, as far as entertainment value goes.

I might have chosen a variable other than "shooting deaths," which encompasses not just murder and non-negligent homicide, but also justifiable homicide and suicide. But I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of cases are murder and non-negligent homicide.

19. In no way...

...am I saying that you are manipulating data or being dishonest in any way. I'm rather certain that there are various groups (mostly right wing folks) who not only think the only answer is more guns but that the real issue is that there isn't a problem.

Clearly, at least for me, there are (major) issues in addition than gun ownership.

22. Fair enough.

Incidentally (going back to your correct assertion that other factors are at play), even though I've characterized the correlation between shooting deaths and gun ownership as very high, the r value (properly, the r-square value) suggests that gun ownership "explains" less than half of the variance, leaving plenty of room for other factors. Even when I throw in a couple other possible causal factors, only a bit over half of the variance is "explained."

Of course, few if any patterns are ever thoroughly "explained" in the social sciences.

40. The survey on gun ownership was conducted

by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Now, I have no idea of the ratio of "proper hands" versus improper ones among the respondents, but I'm guessing that not too many owners with "improper hands" answered in the affirmative, especially since the group has a spooky word like "surveillance" in their name. If true, then what is being measured may be what you call "guns in the proper hands," whatever that means.